Now the relation which, in the sphere of nature, being and semblance or sensation bear to one another in this antithesis, is the same as that which in ethics exists between good and pleasure or feeling.
Interpretation
The quote suggests a parallel between the relationship of reality and perception in nature and the relationship of morality and pleasure in ethics.
Friedrich Schleiermacher highlights a fundamental relationship in both the natural world and ethical considerations, drawing a comparison between the way being and appearance coexist in nature and how good and pleasure or feelings coexist in ethical contexts. This illustrates the complexities of how we perceive reality and morality, suggesting that both are subject to the interplay of objective existence and subjective experience.
In practice
In a debate about moral dilemmas, this quote can illustrate the complexity of ethical decision-making.
The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
Whenever I find a spark of that hidden fire that will sooner or later consume the old and create the new, I am drawn to it with love and hope, regarding it as a sign of my future home.
Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.
The essence of the religious emotions consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.
My grandfather did not travel across 4,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.
Wasn't he the one who said you shouldn't trust anybody who calls himself an ordinar man? - Naoko
The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.
There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.
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